The Worst of the pd.o

Celebrating the last hundred rants.

The Saints | 2003-05-20

In true pd.o style we are marking the occasion of the 600th Pint Day by highlighting some of our past failures. We could have focused on our best work, but it was a lot easier to spot the turkeys.

Our obsession with Air Canada
Horse deceased. Flogging pointless. Unfortunately, the charter of the pd.o Consumer Services Division requires that we bang on this particular monkey until they’re gone, gone, gone. (We’ll be done shortly, thank you.)
The Wine List
What earthly use is this thing? It relates nothing useful about any of the wines listed, and only serves to muck up search engine results. The entries don’t even make sense.
Our uptime comeuppance
The same week that Kev goes off on access providers, a combination of TELUS ineptitude and Kjell’s inattention takes us off the air for several days at a stretch. Which reminds us of:
Kjell’s sysadmin and software development skills
Do you think we call him a BOFH for nothing? “The cat must have walked across the keyboard,” does not a scheduled outage make.
The Headcutting duel
The same tired points, rehashed in a confusing style. This is not what we meant by discourse.
Kev’s early earnestness
He set out to make an impact. He left no stone unturned, and no eyes unglazed. In an effort to clobber his subjects in a meaningful and lasting way, some of Kev’s first rants were—how can we put it?—brevity-challenged. Also, he was unemployed at the time. By contrast, these days he only has time to make his point and get off the pode, which brings us to...
Kjell’s frequent reliance on the Hit ’n’ Run format
Too many petty annoyances, not enough actual content. But it’s important that we stake an early claim to this venerable Suck.com format. We may want to use it later.
Platform inconsistencies
Where exactly does the pd.o stand on the matter of smoking bans? Luckily for us, we’re not a political party. Consistency is for the unimaginative.
Shamelessly repurposed content and other blatant filler
Sometimes the weekly schedule overwhelms us, and we have to dig around for something that can be substituted for real content. A list of bookmarks from 1996? Rehashed diary entries? Alligator questions scrawled on a pub napkin? Anything is good enough for us to serve to our loyal reader.
Our fitfully turgid vocabulary
When two of the three pd.o contributors are scratching their heads and fumbling for their Oxfords, you can be sure the rant needed one more rewrite before publishing.
From the Who Cares? Department
If a rant is not important, relevant, timely, humorous, or even rage-induced, is it still a rant? And if not, are you entitled to a refund?
Anything Evan has written on the topic of architecture
Why does he insist on publicly embarrassing himself this way?
The Muffin
Gross.
All the Codetalker commentary
High-minded righteousness from young, naïve and soon-to-be-former network security professionals. Thanks, but I’ll take a zero. This list would also include the old Codetalker whitepapers, if so many people didn’t link to the damn things. (Bill, I’m looking in your direction.)
What constitutes a Tuesday, anyway?
Fresh every Tuesday has occasionally been stretched to included Tuesday nights on Pacific islands.

Hm. We’ve just accounted for fully 20% of the original content on this site. What does that tell us? Well, obviously the remaining 80% are solid gold.

Wink. Cheers.

Tuesday, May 20, 2003
PD DC

pintday.org » Fresh every Tuesday.